A new GAO report found that nearly one in five school districts canceled classes in 2024-25 because of building problems. That’s 2 million students and about 3.5 million lost days of instruction. Plumbing emergencies. Failed HVAC. One district closed after classrooms hit 110 degrees.
None of that surprises anyone who has run a school facilities department. What should make all of us angry is that voters paid for most of those buildings, and they were told the last bond would take care of it.
The cycle
The cycle is maddening! Bonds pay for construction. Maintenance comes out of the operating budget, and that budget gets squeezed every year as salaries, insurance, utilities and everything else go up. Maintenance is the easiest line to trim because nothing breaks the day you cut it.
So we build, we underfund the upkeep, the building declines faster than it should, and then we go back to voters for a bigger bond to fix what maintenance would have prevented. Then we do it again.
The national numbers show exactly where the money isn’t going. The 2025 State of Our Schools report puts the annual shortfall for K-12 facilities at $90 billion, and $34 billion of that is maintenance and operations. Districts spend about $1,451 per student a year to maintain and operate their buildings. The recommended level is about $2,191.
GAO saw the same thing on the ground. Districts that didn’t have the capacity to do preventive maintenance had more chronic facility problems and lost more instructional time. Nearly half of districts reported chronic facility issues that regularly disrupted teaching.
You can’t bond your way out of a maintenance problem. Every bond without a sustainment plan is a down payment on the next one.
Put the sustainment plan next to the bond
If you’re putting a bond on the ballot, you better put the lifecycle sustainment plan right next to it. Show what it costs to own the building, not just to build it. At a minimum, voters should be able to see:
- The cost of ownership over the building’s life. Construction is the smallest part of what a school costs over 40 or 50 years. Show the operating, maintenance and renewal costs too.
- The annual sustainment budget and where it comes from. A real line in the operating budget, protected, with a dollar figure. “We’ll maintain it” is not a plan.
- What the last bond bought and how it’s holding up. If the roofs and chillers from the last bond are already in trouble, voters deserve to know why before they fund the next one.
- Which systems are closest to failing, and what happens when they do. Skip the condition score and show the consequence: which schools close, how many students go home, how many days are lost.
- The debt picture. What you pay in debt service today, what you’ll pay after this bond, and what that leaves for everything else.
Voters are getting smarter. They will back the next bond when they can see you have a plan to protect the improvements from the last one. They will reject it if you don’t, and they should.
The question nobody wants to answer
Every bond adds debt service, and debt service comes off the top before a single filter gets changed. If maintenance keeps getting cut to make room, the buildings decline faster, you need another bond sooner, and the debt service grows again.
So ask it out loud: at what point does the cost of servicing your bond debt make your district insolvent? Most boards have never seen that line drawn. They better see it before they vote to put another bond on the ballot.
What to do before the next bond
- Build the lifecycle cost for what you already own. Start with the big systems: roofs, HVAC, plumbing, electrical. Age, condition, expected life, replacement cost.
- Set a protected maintenance budget and hold it. Pick a target, fund it every year, and report against it publicly.
- Rank the risk by consequence to students. Which failure closes a school? That’s where the first dollars go.
- Show the debt service trend over the next 20 years, with and without the new bond, next to the maintenance budget.
- Report on the last bond. What was promised, what was delivered, and what it costs to keep it in shape.
What does your district show voters besides the construction number? And has anyone on your board asked how much more debt the operating budget can carry?
